If I wasn’t going to teach in a public school, and I wasn’t ready for the mission field, how then could I best serve God, who—from everything I could gather—appreciated sacrificing oneself? Clearly, I was meant to go back to live in the same city as my parents, so that I could be appropriately miserable. Convinced of my calling, I applied to the only Christian school in the area.
I interviewed—and did not get the job. In my own eyes I was doubly a failure; the expectation in those days and in my church was that a young woman would have a dual degree at graduation: BA and MRS. I had no plan B; I rarely do. I had set myself up to be supremely miserable and self-sacrificing. I would go not just to my parents’ city but also to their home and look for work when I got there. I had no idea what I was doing and not a clue as to what God might be doing. The Akron Children’s Home, based in a multi-story brick building not far from the rubber factories in town, wanted to provide a home-like atmosphere away from the smog for young people. Multiple buildings had been erected just down the road from my high school, not two miles from my parents’ home. With no experience in supervising teenagers, I was hired as a houseparent, for no reason I could see. I was an English and Bible major, with no social work background. Two adults shared the responsibility of live-in parents, each working four days round the clock, three days off, sleeping there with the young people. The director had assigned me to Kibler Hall, a dozen girls ages 13 to 17, known to be problems. Boys climbed in the second-story windows, girls climbed out, marijuana was prevalent. Why he placed me—only five years older than the oldest girls and naïve—among them is a mystery. One afternoon we were in the kitchen/dining area, making sandwiches for lunch, when a thirteen-year-old girl brandished a butcher knife in my face. I don’t recall why she was angry or which of the other girls calmed her down. Paralyzed with fear and shock then, I’ve blocked it all. I decided it was time to quit, even though I’d had the job only about a month and had no other options. Memory picks up in the director’s office with his refusal to accept my resignation and instead making a counteroffer. The girls of Kibler clearly needed a different model of house parenting, with someone awake on night duty to keep the boys and drugs out and the girls in. Would I take on the night shift? Dealing directly with the girls would no longer be my responsibility. Having no better option, I agreed to try. So, I entered a strange existence of staying awake, reading, praying, and journaling, checking on the girls, and talking to the night watchman, who turned out to have been my beloved junior high school bus driver. During the day I slept in my parent’s partially finished basement, which my mother had divided into living spaces, and which was cooler and quieter than my bedroom upstairs.
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Baptist GirlI was a conservative Baptist girl who grew up to become a career Christian, working first in a Baptist school and then in a Baptist college. For about three decades, it was very good until it wasn’t, and I had to leave. But the Baptists formed me. This is my homage to the good times and good people of the world I left, finally, at forty-three, when I became an Episcopalian. These are my memories; others might disagree with my recollections. So be it. Archives
January 2024
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